Kreyol Intertextuality and Decolonizing Narrative in Veillées noires
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Dalhousie French Studies
Revue d'études littéraires du Canada atlantique
Kreyol Intertextuality and Decolonizing Narrative in Veillées
noires
Kevin Meehan
Dossier spécial Léon-Gontran Damas Article abstract
Number 116, Summer 2020 This essay identifies three levels of intertextuality in the short story, “Echec et
mat” by Léon-Gontran Damas. Incorporating folkloric tales, lyrics from
URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1071041ar popular music, and 19th Century satiric writing in Kreyol, “Echec et mat” offers
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/1071041ar a microcosm of the intertextual techniques employed throughout the entire
collection, Veillées noires. In particular, I analyze Damas’s embedding of a
satire written and published in Kreyol by Guadeloupean author Paul Baudot.
See table of contents
While this Kreyol satire—written by a white béké author from the mid-19th
Century—is ambiguous politically, and must be determined by musical and
folkloric references, Damas nevertheless signals the importance of earlier
Publisher(s) Caribbean writing in Kreyol. Such writing co-exists with other forms of cultural
production and is part of the reservoir from which Damas draws to assemble
Department of French, Dalhousie University
his complex anti-colonial discourse. These intertextual traces reveal a cultural
identity that is plural as well as anti-colonial.
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0711-8813 (print)
2562-8704 (digital)
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Cite this article
Meehan, K. (2020). Kreyol Intertextuality and Decolonizing Narrative in
Veillées noires. Dalhousie French Studies, (116), 19–28.
https://doi.org/10.7202/1071041ar
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https://www.erudit.org/en/Kreyol Intertextuality and Decolonizing Narrative
in Veillées noires
Kevin Meehan
L éon-Gontran Damas is usually remembered as a great poet and the third founding
father of Négritude (with Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor). However, he
was also a superb writer of fiction, and his 1943 volume of folkloric short stories, Veillées
noires, presents a rich field of decolonizing interventions.1 Examining the story “Échec et
mat” as a microcosm of strategies employed throughout the entire collection, this essay
identifies three different levels of intertextuality used by Damas to assemble a complex
anticolonial discourse grounded in a range of earlier Kreyol-based cultural production
techniques. Taken together, these examples of intertextuality express an identity that
projects its decolonizing vision across multiple classes, racial groups, language forms, and
historical periods.
Veillées noires is a collection of stories based first and foremost on folktales culled by
Damas from his childhood memories as well as fieldwork collecting carried out in the
previous decade when he returned to his homeland of Guyane (French Guyana) after
studying in Paris. Published by Stock Editions, a venerable Parisian publishing house that
was once known as “the Temple of Taste” for having previously introduced French readers
to works by Voltaire and Rousseau, Damas’s book contains nineteen stories along with a
fascinating introduction by the author commenting on the origins and narratological
features of the tales, the importance of the stories for healthy identity formation in a milieu
shaped by diaspora and pressure from the French colonial policy of assimilation, the
impossibility of absorbing, translating, or otherwise assimilating Kreyol utterances into the
volume’s flow of literary French, and the status of Guyanese society as a “marvelous”
(merveilleux) space defined by its Amazon Basin setting.
Each story subtly yet ruthlessly dissects assimilationist ideology, tracing its disruptive
impact on language, moral codes, and personal psychology, as well as its divisive
stratification along class, gender, and racial lines. Drawing on folktales, popular songs, and
written Kreyol political satire from 19th Century Antillean authors, the stories also explore
sites of resistance capable of repairing fractured psyches and reconstituting social factions
into decolonizing alliances. As an example of how imagining alliances can bridge social
divisions, though Damas was born into the Francophile mulatto elite based in Cayenne, he
proudly claimed filial ties to French Guyana’s African maroons as well as the Amerindian
communities who settled both coastal regions and the jungle interior of the colony; indeed,
one of the most striking things about these stories is the value attached to African-
Amerindian dialogue, and the nuanced picture of négritude that consequently emerges in
stories that intermingle Ashanti and Carib folkloric characters.2
1 I gratefully acknowledge support from the National Endowment for the Humanities that allowed me to spend
time as a Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where the Damas Papers
are located.
2 Damas identifies the Maroon settlements in French Guyana as being Ashanti in origin and another story in the
collection, “Pêche en eau trouble,” features Turtle, Firefly, and Tiger, all of whom are familiar characters in
Ashanti folklore (on the Ashanti roots of Guyanese Maroons, see Damas, Retour de Guyane 25-27; for Ashanti
folklore see Rattray, and Pelton 25-70). The figure of Tiger is pivotal, though, for projecting a cross-cultural
Maroon-Carib articulation. For readings that locate Tiger as a totemic figure for Carib and other equatorial
Amerindian groups, see Whitehead (ii, 182, 224 n. 11), Roth, Inquiry into Animism (143), and Métraux (155
ff.). For a Carib tale pitting Turtle against Tiger with a better outcome for Turtle, see Roth, “Introductory Study”
(483-84). For an overview of Caribbean literary discourse on Amerindians, see Gannier, who includes a
comment on Damas emphasizing “mixed” Maroon-Carib groups in the jungle interior (162). For an overview
Dalhousie French Studies 116 (2020)
- 19 -20 Kevin Meehan
Stylistically, Damas is well-known for the striking, percussive rhythms of his poetry
emphasizing short lines, repeated phrases and images, and a piercing directness in his
poems and his personality.3 In the stories of Veillées noires, all of these qualities—
compression, ironic humor, precise confrontation—are projected through the folktale form
that provides the foundation for Damas’s storytelling. While folklore collecting would have
been a standard part of the field research that led to Damas’s travelogue/ethnographic
writing in his previous book, Retour de Guyane, several things make the methodology and
genesis of Veillées noires unique.4 First, Damas insists in his introduction that his contact
with the folktales is in fact a re-introduction to cultural scenes familiar to him since
childhood. Damas’s status as a cultural insider is conveyed in the “ecstatic” sentiments
expressed when he recalls the “merveilleuses veillées noires sur la rive de la lourde Mana,
où je me sentais redevenir enfant en retrouvant les mêmes contes parmi le même puissant
arôme de fleurs sauvages exaspérés par la nuit équatoriale” (10), and in his boundless
reverence for the real-life source of the tales, an ancient woman storyteller named Tètèche.
Simultaneously, the writing in Veillées noires places Damas outside the space of the
folktale performance, through the use of literary French as a narrative vehicle for stories
Damas claims were initially recited by Tètèche in “la dialectique sonore et nuancée du
patois créole” (9).5
Another way in which the narratives collected in Veillées noires depart from
ethnographic conventions is through their status as fiction. Scholars have generated
innumerable books and lengthy journal articles containing transcriptions of tales provided
to the researcher by an informant. This body of work is typified, for example, in the
compendium of creation and animal tales from the Amazonian Chiriguano people
published by the esteemed folklorist Alfred Métraux in 1932 (and cited above in note 2).
Although Damas seems to situate his work in the same category when he writes of the tales
that, “J’ai fait de mon mieux pour les transcrire, tandis que Tètèche parlait,” (Veillées
noires 12) in fact the stories in Veillées noires are imaginative re-creations that challenge
the generic boundaries of folklore and are more properly characterized as literary texts. By
introducing the vernacular-speaking Tètèche as narrator of the tales while opting to use
standard French as the register for her storytelling voice, Damas effectively situates his
folkloric content as modern and progressive rather than primitive, exotic, or vestigial, as
the disciplinary imperatives of ethnology would have mandated.6 In trending toward
modernist literary expression and away from documentarian folklore, Damas resembles his
of race and ethnicity in French Guyana, and an analysis of contemporary relations between Maroons,
Amerindians, and the French state apparatus, see Collomb (206-210).
3 As African American jazz poet Jayne Cortez memorably expressed it: “Damas was very sharp, he was a sharp
thinker, a real critical thinker, and he could put his finger on the pulse right away. He was a sharp, intense,
humorous, confrontational brother all in one slice. […] In all of our conversations when he commented on
something or somebody, he sort of was able to go straight to the core of it and do it in two or three words, just
like his poetry—rhythmic—and just like that with that curious gleam in his eye. He was very poetic, ironic, and
precise” (quoted in Meehan 126).
4 The fact that Damas based his fiction on the folktale genre makes perfect sense in light of his connections to
Paul Rivet, Marcel Mauss and Michel Leiris, who were, respectively, Damas’s teachers and fellow student at
the Institut d’Ethnologie in Paris. For more information and commentary on Damas’s relationship to the
ethnology movement of 1930s France, see Gyssels (46-48), Kesteloot (232), and Ojo-Ade (12-14, 17).
5 As a field researcher, Damas’s intriguing insider-outsider position is comparable to the scenarios faced at
precisely the same time by Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Alejo Carpentier, and others. Hurston writes
about her insider-outsider relationship to African American folklore in the opening paragraphs of Mules and
Men (9), and her similar relationship to Caribbean culture in Tell My Horse, especially in the chapter “Women
in the Caribbean” (326-30). See also Dunham’s “Footnote on Going Native” in Journey to Accompong (51-52),
and Paul B. Miller’s analysis of the insider-outsider dynamic in works by Carpentier and René Maran (4-5).
6 The classic indictment of Western anthropology’s tendency to deny coevalness to the societies it scrutinizes can
be found in Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other (31-35), but see also Thomas Ward’s more recent
characterization of this dynamic as “taking as a given the modernity of a West bent on studying the
‘primitiveness’ of other societies, judging them by a European timeline, not by their own” (97).Veillées noires 21
regional contemporaries Zora Neale Hurston, Lydia Cabrera, and the Haitian novelist
Jacques Roumain (also a fellow classmate of Damas at the Institut d’Ethnologie).7
Standard French is also the language of empire, assimilation, and the mission
civilisatrice, yet Damas’ prose style is not a seamless flow of Parnassian French. In a
linguistic analysis of Damas, Marie-Christine Hazaël-Massieux refers to an “immense
souffle créole” that permeates his entire body of work (“Damas et ses langues” 117).
Indeed, by loading the narrative of Veillées noires with song lyrics, aphorisms, riddles,
repetitive phrases, and allusions to earlier Antillean writing in Kreyol, Damas employs
three different levels of intertextuality to generate a flexible decolonizing literary vehicle
drawing from a full spectrum of traditional as well as modern cultural forms.8 To begin
with, Damas invokes an obscure but extensive archive of printed Antillean texts in Kreyol.
At one point in “Échec et mat,” when two of his characters are having a contest of
improvised performances, one of them, Kariakou (Gazelle), recites part of “Proclamation
de Fondoc, Gouverneur de Guadeloupe et Dépendances,” a text that parodies the
authoritarian political and verbal style of a mid-19th century governor of Guadeloupe. In
fact, this “speech” is taken verbatim from a 1890 volume, Nos Créoles, by Armand Corre,
who is himself transcribing the text from an earlier satirical anticolonial piece published
around 1860 by the Guadeloupean writer, Paul Baudot. While the original text by Baudot
does a good job of ridiculing the French colonial regime—and uses Kreyol as the linguistic
vehicle—Corre, who was a Paris-based medical doctor, sociologist and criminologist,
reveals his pro-colonial orientation by translating the Kreyol into French and expressing
extreme anti-black sentiments throughout Nos Créoles.9 Perhaps because of these
colonialist vibrations, Kariakou’s interlocutor and the protagonist in Damas’s story,
Tortue, ultimately rejects the verbal style of the embedded speech in favor of improvised
songs.
Tortue’s preference for songs over politico-bureaucratic speech (and parodies of it)
signals a second level of intertextuality that is created through repeated references to
popular music. In “Échec et mat,” the improv contests also feature musical performances,
with the song lyrics presented in both French and Kreyol.10 Sociologically, these songs are
expressions of the white and mixed-race peasant population of “rudes travailleurs”
celebrated by Damas in Retour de Guyane (75). While the lyrics transcribed in “Échec et
mat” do not always have an overt anticolonial message, they are elements of what Damas
describes as “un folklore d’une richesse incommensurable” (Retour 75) whose music and
dance are derived “nettement de tradition africaine” (ibid.) and whose peasant animators
7 Though the reception of Damas’s fiction remains limited, within that subfield there are numerous examinations
that explore Damas’s mediation of folkloric materials. While I discuss the Caribbean, African and global scope
for the “feast in the sky” tale that provides a narrative kernel for “Échec et mat,” this approach is not my primary
focus in the present essay. Readers interested in this topic can consult Modeseni and Chevrier for further
commentary on specific animal tales referenced in Damas’s collection. Gyssels, “Lapin, Luciole,” and Pestre
de Almeida explore Damas’s relation to modernist peers and postmodernist successors across the Americas who
also engage folkloric content in their fiction.
8 “Damas et ses langues” by Hazaël-Massieux provides an indispensable guide to the different language forms
on display in Damas’s writing and traces the influence of Kreyols (particularly Guyanese and Martinican),
regional French, and the highest level of academic and artistic French (“le français le plus elaboré” 126). Even
while characterizing his prose as an example of carefully-written French in which “la part des sonorités et d’une
éventuelle exploitation de l’oralité est très reduite” (133), she nevertheless concludes that Kreyol, in Veillées
noires, “tient une place directe plus importante que dans les poèmes” (122).
9 Corre’s prejudice seems to be part of a larger paranoia about the purported negative impact of overseas
departments on the metropolitan French body politic. Evidence of this can be found in the following warning
issued in Nos Créoles: “Français de la Métropole, j’ai à déplorer l’immixtion de l’élément colonial dans nos
propres affaires, la prépondérance dangereuse que cet élément a conquise par l’intrigue, au sein du ministère de
la marine et qu’il essaie d’acquérir en d’autres ministères” (5-6).
10 See—and hear—for example, “Tant Sirop Est Doux,” which is embedded toward the end of “Échec et mat”
(132). A 30-second audio clip performed by Emilie George is available from Folkways Records at
https://folkways.si.edu/emilie-george/tant-sirop-est-doux/world/music/track/smithsonian22 Kevin Meehan
Damas finds to be “naturels, spontanés et forts de cette simplicité” (ibid.). As in Retour de
Guyane, the embedded song lyrics in “Échec et mat” carry an assumption that popular
cultural activity exists outside of colonial authority and retains a strong element of
autonomy.
If the first two types of intertextual references reflect, respectively, an anticolonial
Béké elite and a French Guyanese peasant population, all of these references are framed
and managed through a third level of intertextuality. This third level relates to the folkloric
tales—known in French literary studies as “fables, contes et légendes”—that were
conveyed to Damas as a child and to which he was reintroduced during his fieldwork
research during the mid-1930s. While these three levels of intertextuality suggest how
nuanced Damas’ approach is to understanding and articulating a multi-faceted
decolonizing identity, it is worth restating that the matrix for this articulation, the tradition
of oral tales and legends, is itself a plural mélange of African and Amerindian folklore,
which supports the claims of recent scholars who have argued for the unique status of
Damasian négritude as a fluid and dynamic concept when compared and contrasted with
the more well-known ideas propounded by Senghor and Césaire.11
For the remainder of this essay, I want to examine more closely the first type of
intertextuality, which is embodied in Damas’ reference to Baudot’s “Proclamation de
Fondoc, Gouverneur de Guadeloupe et Dépendances.” As mentioned above, this is a
written Kreyol text published originally by Baudot in 1860, then later by Corre in 1890
(when it was translated from Kreyol to French), published again in 1923 (in a slightly
different French translation) as part of a volume of Baudot’s work edited by Maurice
Martin, republished by Martin in a second edition in 1935, and finally re-issued in a 1980
reprint of Martin’s second edition to commemorate the “Année du Patrimoine” in
Guadeloupe. To clarify the context for Damas’ invocation of Baudot’s text, we can begin
by noting that “Échec et mat” is based in part on a popular tale of Tortue being carried aloft
by birds then dropped back to earth in pain and humiliation. On the surface, this is a story
told to children to explain the appearance of tortoise shells, which seem to have been pieced
together from broken fragments. There are many written versions of the tale offered by
authors ranging from the Creolist poet Gilbert Gratiant who was Damas’s instructor at the
Lycée Schœlcher in Martinique, back through Haitian poet and politician Georges Sylvain
earlier in the 20th century, Marbot in the 19th century, La Fontaine in the 17th century, and
Aesop in the classical era. There are also traditional variants from India and West Africa,
and in the Ibo version that is re-told in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (67-70), Turtle is male
and the occasion for taking flight is his desire to attend a feast being given in heaven. This
narrative thread, which is unique to the Ibo story, is incorporated prominently in Damas’s
story, though Tortue is gendered female by Damas. A consistent element throughout all
versions is Tortue’s identity as a verbal trickster and a malcontent, and while different
versions of the tale provide different reasons for Turtle’s discontent, and draw different
11 See in particular Wilder (151-57), F. Bart Miller (42) and Gyssels (“Damas et le mythe de l’Amérindien” 53-
54) for discussions of Damasian négritude in comparative and contrastive relation to Césaire and Senghor.
Gyssels has emphasized throughout her scholarship how Damas in fact remained ambivalent about the identity
forms associated with the literary and political movement he helped to found, and maintained a consistent view
of himself as someone with “three rivers running through his veins” (Gyssels, “Give me back my black dolls”
107). It is tempting to link Damas with more recent non-binaristic identity concepts such as “métissage”
(Glissant 250), “hybridity” (Bhabha 159-165), “liquid modernity” (Bauman 1-8), “performativity” (Butler 185-
93), and “differential consciousness” (Sandoval 135-43, 181). This list could be broadened, but what I want to
suggest is that Damas’s capacious approach to culture, identity and politics speaks for itself in its time and place.
His praxis exemplifies the qualities of fluidity and multiplicity that define his work around race and
decolonization and does not need to be justified through association with more well-known contemporary
concepts. His work speaks as a prophetic articulation of what we could expect and indeed have seen in the
decades since his death, and serves as a guide to how we might best envision ourselves and position ourselves
in current struggles for individual and collective freedom, survival, and resilience.Veillées noires 23
moral lessons, it is easy to see how Tortue in “Échec et mat” works as a symbolic projection
of Damas’s desire to vocalize his own anticolonial sentiments.12
In Damas’s retelling of the feast in the sky tale, Tortue arranges transportation with
Vulture but is dropped and humiliated very quickly by the second page. The rest of the
story, which is the longest one in Veillées noires, depicts Tortue claiming vengeance one
by one on animals who had verbally or physically abused her. The recitation of Baudot’s
parodic speech appears later in the story after Tortue has already violently dispatched
several of these antagonists. The speech itself is a series of 23 paragraphs, each criticizing
an aspect of colonial governance in Guadeloupe and suggesting how the speaker, Fondoc
(a porte-parole pseudonym adopted frequently by Baudot), will resolve the problems now
that he has been elevated to the governorship. Damas includes most of the speech, up to
paragraph 16, in which Fondoc visits local schools where recently-emancipated adult
students are learning to read and write. “Voyons; ils écrivent!” he proclaims, and goes on
to note that their literacy training does not mean an end to cultivating the land:
Ça n’empêche pas de travailler la terre ; sans manioc, sans igname, sans café et
sans sucre, adieu porcelaine. Il ne restera que les couis et pensez-y souvent : la
première peine ici-bas, c’est d’avoir le ventre vide. (Baudot 103)13
To decipher this intertextual reference, we must first recognize the incredibly complex
palimpsest it represents. On the surface, we have Damas’s 1943 reference to Baudot
(though, again, it is a partial reference including only 16 of the original 23 paragraphs).
One layer below this surface, so to speak, are two competing intermediary texts, one from
1923/1935 by Martin who re-printed and re-translated Baudot’s Kreyol original into French
for publication in Guadeloupe, in a book titled Œuvres Créoles. The other is Corre’s 1890
volume, Nos Créoles, which offers the French translation preferred by Damas in his story.
12 The nature of Turtle’s transgression, punishment, and the resulting moral vary significantly from tale to tale. In
the Indian and Greek/French version, Turtle simply wants to see the world from a bird’s eye viewpoint, and
when he is dropped back to earth, the moral lesson is about being content with one’s lot. A variation on this has
Turtle holding onto a stick carried aloft by two geese who warn him not to talk during the flight. When he opens
his mouth to talk back to the geese or (in some versions) to people on the ground, disaster ensues, providing a
cautionary tale about talking too much (Vogel 44-46). In the Ibo tale, when Turtle arrives at the feast in the sky,
he tricks the birds and the host into letting him eat all the food. His feathers are stripped and his fall back to
earth warns readers/listeners against gluttony. In Damas’s re-telling, we encounter the feast in the sky thread
from the Ibo story, and read of Tortue’s frustrated efforts to reach Heaven until she is picked up by Vulture who
is on his way to the party. When Vulture is halfway to Heaven, he drops Tortue purely out spite, which correlates
more with the Indian/Greek/French version. The moral logic of “Échec et mat” is Damas’s original creation,
though, because Tortue is not greedy, nor over-weening in her desire to join the party in Heaven. Instead, she is
the victim of Vulture’s unwarranted treachery and this morality is reinforced by the detail that the Virgin Mary
is the one who picks up the pieces of Tortue’s broken shell and puts them back together after her fall. The
balance of the story traces Tortue’s successful efforts to triumph other animals who have slighted or threatened
her.
13 Compare the original text from Baudot as given first by Martin and then Corre:
“…mais il faut que j’aille moi-même à l’école des marmailles, attraper ces grandes négresses et ces grandes
nègres à barbes pour leur faire voir que savoir lire et écrire n’empêche pas de travailler la terre. Sans manioc,
adieu la nourriture; sans café et sucre, adieu toile, madras, parasols, Cornichons! À la place d’assiettes en
porcelaine, vous aurez des couis. La houe! La houe! habitants, convient à toutes les couleurs de peau; et, pensez-
y bien: le premier chagrin des gens, est devoir le ventre vide” (Baudot 177).
“…mais il faut que j'aille aux écoles de ces marmailles, pour secouer ces grandes négresses, ces grands nègres
à grande barbe. Voyons ; ils écrivent ! Ça n'empêche pas de travailler la terre ; sans manioc, pas d'igname ; sans
café et sans sucre, adieu toiles, madras, parasols, cornichons; au lieu d'assiettes en porcelaine, il ne restera que
les couis (calebasses servant de vaisselle). La houe ! La houe ! Habitants, elle convient aux peaux de toutes les
couleurs, et songez-y bien, la première peine ici-bas, c'est d'avoir le ventre vide...” (Corre 292).
While Damas’ citation more closely approximates Corre’s translation of Baudot, it is clear that the version of
Fondoc’s speech presented in “Échec et mat” has been re-fashioned, which strengthens the view that Damas is
producing original creative writing rather than simple documentation of a folkloric archive.24 Kevin Meehan
Still further down in the layers of literary history contained in this passage, we find not
only the original iteration in Kreyol by Baudot, but a related 1859 text that tells roughly
the same story about the arrival of Gen. Frébault in Basse-Terre. Frébault, a hero in the
French victory at the Battle of Solferino, and later an artillery commander in the Franco-
Prussian War and senator for life in the French parliament, served as governor in
Guadeloupe from 1859-1863. Baudot’s Kreyol poem, “Récit par Fondoc à Fondagnant sur
l’Arrivée du Gouverneur Frébault à Basse-Terre,” memorializes this high government
official as “autoritaire et juste” and one who greets the assembled crowd with “mille saluts
pleins de grâce” (23). The terms here, which are respectful and suggestive of general public
harmony (Baudot 22-28), stand in sharp contrast to the satirical “Proclamation” which
ridicules the governor’s discourse, loudly protests the social decay allowed to exist under
colonial authority, and undermines that authority by peppering the speech with Rabelaisian
obscenity. Every paragraph begins, “Zabitan foute!/Habitans, foutre!” 14
Each layer of this palimpsest creates a different potential resonance for Damas’s own
intertextual use of Baudot’s “Proclamation.” Moving back through the different layers, we
start with Baudot himself, who was a notary public, or “notaire,” and scraped out a living
in the lower rungs of the colonial bureaucracy for fifty-odd years (Martin x-xi).15 The
pseudonymously-voiced “Proclamation” allows him—via the narrative persona of
Fondoc—more freedom to launch a critical commentary on that bureaucracy than would
normally be possible.
For Corre, translating and republishing literary expression in written Kreyol allows
him to extend research on cultural mores in the colonial periphery, something he was
mostly interested in from the standpoint of criminology. As someone who built a career
trying to analyze and contain perceived social pathologies in and from the French empire,
Corre easily uses Baudot’s text to help project a condescending idea of “Nos Créoles”
living in a debased world where language is hobbled by mimicry. Though Kreyol has “ses
interjections et diverses locutions propres,” it is “souvent imitatives, à consonances
redoublées” (261). Corre goes on to disparage Kreyol as a manifestation of supposed black
inferiority in the following terms:
C’est un apport du nègre, qui remédie à la pauvreté des mots-idées fixes dans sa
cervelle, par des exclamations ou de brèves figures, résumant toute une
association de sentiments, coupant aussi trop fréquemment le discours, à tort et
à travers, sans la moindre raison (ibid.).
Martin, writing in 1923/1935, has a more sympathetic rationale for retranslating and
republishing this text. In his preface, Martin seems to be promoting a history of written
literature in Kreyol as kind of soft cultural nationalism. Such writing, he claims, “aiderait
certainement aujourd’hui à l’étude de notre patois et nous éclairerait sur les mœurs de
différentes époques de notre histoire locale” (Martin ix). The implication that an imagined
14 The actual text in “Échec et mat,” is a speech given by Kariakou in response to a request from Tortue that she
“Récite-nous donc quelque chose, un morceau d’auteur étranger, de preference” (Damas, Veillées noires 121).
Kariakou begins reciting thea proclamation addressed by Fondoc to his audience of “Habitants” in which he
parodies the authoritarian pronouncements of a former governor (presumably Frébault). After comparing the
text of Veillées noires with the two versions of Baudot’s “Proclamation,” it is clear Damas adheres more closely
to Corre’s French rendering of the original Kreyol. Where Martin translates the opening Kreyol phrase of the
speech, “Zautes pas té ka coué moin sré monté général” (Baudot 172), as “Vous ne croyaiez pas je serais arrivé
général” (Baudot 173), Corre renders it “Vous ne voiliez pas croire que je deviendrais général” (Corre 290), and
this is closer to the wording that appears in Damas’s tale: “vous ne vouliez pas croire qu’un jour je deviendrais
Général” (Damas, Veillées noires 121). Where Martin retains the borderline obscenity, “Zabitan Foutre!” Corre
sanitizes it to “Zabitan F….” while Damas excizes it completely, and gives readers simply the word, “Habitans.”
It is interesting to speculate why Damas, who was never one to hold his tongue, would have toned down this
particular expression, but perhaps he was feeling the combined effect of life during wartime under Nazi
occupation and his previous experiences of censorship.
15 For more on Baudot’s contribution to Antillean writing in Kreyol, see Hazaël-Massieux (30-31, 162-183).Veillées noires 25
community of readers needs to embrace Guadeloupian cultural autonomy but within the
French state apparatus is amplified in “Pourquoi Paul Baudot?” an essay published as a
foreword to the 1980 re-issue of Œuvres Créoles. Writing for the Comité départemental de
l’Année du Patrimoine, Edmund Bambuck endorses Baudot’s work as a solid example of
“patrimoine littéraire” and describes his writing as “une œuvre créole susceptible de
marquer un moment de la vie de notre pays, de ses traditions et de ses coutumes” (Bambuck
i).
Damas’s own cultural politics do not align with any of the above figures, though he
shares elements with each one. His interest in national liberation struggles encompasses
the affirmation of Kreyol identity evident in Martin’s text but has more in common with
Gratiant and other Créolistes for whom such a linguistic and literary tradition functions as
a touchstone for political independence.16 Damas was a staunch critic of the psychology
of assimilation and a prophet of what later generations of anticolonial writers and activists
including Fanon, Ngugi and others would refer to as “decolonizing the mind.” He saw his
fiction as having a role to play in this process and specifically mentions directing his
“contes-histoires” at young adults of Caribbean descent living in France and struggling
with the psychological damages of assimilation. According to Damas in his introduction to
Veillées noires,
Et c’est ainsi que ces contes me sont apparus comme la voix même de
la Guyane, ma Terre natale.
Et j’ai voulu que Tètèche parlât aux petits et aux grands enfants
d’Europe, comme elle parlait à ses enfants petits et grands de Là-Bas. (10-11)
His interest in diagnosing and remediating psycho-generative disorders among a target
audience of imperfectly assimilated Antillean migrants ironically places Damas in a
position of methodological kinship with Corre, albeit with diametrically opposed politics.17
Though we have no information about which versions of Baudot were available to Damas,
his grounding in social science theory and practice may help to explain why he would use
Corre—a regular presenter at the Société d’anthropologie de Paris throughout the 1880s,
90s, and early 1900s—rather than Martin as his source text for a French translation of
Baudot. Baudot’s original text, meanwhile, in itself fulfills some of Damas’ ideological
objectives, and particularly resonates with the latter’s strident critique of French colonial
administration, fueled by his experiences of censorship and underdevelopment in the
colonies and ever-fewer opportunities for advancement in the colonial offices in Paris
during the interwar period.18
As an artifact of written Kreyol literary discourse reiterated several times over in the
decades between its original publication and Damas’s intertextual use of it in “Échec et
mat,” Baudot’s “Proclamation de Fondoc” is fundamentally ambiguous. It can be used to
advance the aims of soft cultural nationalists like Martin and Bambuck, and can even be
16 See Schnepel for a comprehensive discussion of how Kreyol language politics have evolved across five centuries
in the Caribbean and, particularly in Guadeloupe, how the quest to create, document, and popularize Kreyol
literature has functioned as an aspect of nationalist / indépendantiste culture (20-34, 81-85, 207-213).
17 Although Damas is operating in disciplinary social space that is remarkably similar to Corre’s, several things
mark the difference between Damas’s decolonizing aims and the ultra-colonialist nature of Corre’s work as a
social scientist and translator. Where Corre imagines his mission is to protect the metropole against “l’immixtion
de l’élément colonial dans nos propres affaires,” Damas is concerned with improving the mental health of
colonized citizens, offering his stories as a remedy against the psychology of assimilation. In addition to these
different imagined audiences and different ideas about the potential impact of written words, Damas clearly has
a more positive, well-informed view of Kreyol than Corre. Where Corre, as we saw above, sees Kreyol as a
dysfunctional language “sans la moindre raison,” Damas claims in his introduction to Veillées noires, “J’ai
essayé de respecter, encourant le risque d’être parfois obscure, la tradition orale des pays créoles au langage
d’une subtilité souvent déconcertante” (11).
18 On the professional experiences of Antilleans and other colonial citizens in the French state bureaucracy, see
Wilder 217-232.26 Kevin Meehan
compatible with imperialist disdain for the colonized as expressed by Corre. In a similar
way, Damas himself occupies an existentially ambiguous place, having been trained and
enabled to operate within the very circuits of colonialist discourses and practices—
ethnology, literary publishing in French—that his writing is designed to resist and
dismantle. Given this textual and situational ambiguity, Damas deploys several other types
of intertextuality, other citations to other cultural practices that compete with and ultimately
stage and control his use of written Antillean literature in Kreyol. Writing in Kreyol has its
place in an anticolonialist polemic, indeed, but more important, and more reliable is the
body of oral tradition, the “contes, légendes et fables” that serve as the organizing matrix
of Damas literary production in Veillées noires.
University of Central Florida
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